https://www.adl.org/news/article/sacha-baron-cohens-keynote-address-at-adls-2019-never-is-now-summit-on-anti-semitism
What do all these dangerous trends have in common? I’m just a comedian and an actor, not a scholar. But one thing is pretty clear to me. All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.
The greatest propaganda machine in history.
Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others—they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged—stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It’s why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It’s why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it’s no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history—the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, “Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook.”
On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC. The fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion look as valid as an ADL report. And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.
21 November, 2019
19 November, 2019
17 November, 2019
Why Google’s Quantum Supremacy Milestone Matters
Google officially announced last week in the journal Nature that it achieved the milestone of “quantum supremacy.” This phrase, coined by the physicist John Preskill in 2012, refers to the first use of a quantum computer to make a calculation much faster than we know how to do it with even the fastest supercomputers available. The calculation doesn’t need to be useful: much like the Wright Flyer in 1903, or Enrico Fermi’s nuclear chain reaction in 1942, it only needs to prove a point.
Over the last decade, together with students and colleagues, I helped develop much of the theoretical underpinning for quantum supremacy experiments like Google’s. I reviewed Google’s paper before it was published. So the least I can do is to try to explain what it means.
16 November, 2019
Interview: Ex-head of legislature Jasper Tsang says the gov’t is weakest player of four in Hong Kong’s struggle
It is dangerous for Hong Kong. I don’t know what the people in Beijing want. Up to now, they have no intention to interfere. Now, I see four players:
- The protesters: they don’t have any intention to stop.
- The people: a large part of our population is supporting them.
- The SAR government: it is incapable of doing anything, Carrie Lam has admitted it. The government is made up of very competent administrators but there are no politicians.
- Beijing: they have no intention to interfere.
If all this doesn’t change, we cannot expect it to end.
The Central and the SAR governments want to appeal to the public to denounce the radicals. But is not working.
My hope lies in the protesters; it seems that, recently, some of them have called to stop the violence. And there is a very good reason for that. Elections are coming and it is very probable, as public sentiment is very much against the government, that if they take place in November, the pro-government camp will lose.
14 November, 2019
Radar finds more than 120 coffins buried beneath Tampa apartment complex
TAMPA — Zion Cemetery has been found.
Ground-penetrating radar has detected what appear to be more than 120 coffins under an apartment complex in Tampa, the remains of the lost cemetery revealed by the Tampa Bay Times.
The 2½-acre, segregation-era burial ground, believed to be the city’s first for African-Americans, was established in 1901 along the 3700 block of Florida Ave. and extended back around 400 feet.
It disappeared nearly a century ago when the land was parceled off for white developments.
12 November, 2019
The SoftBank Effect: How $100 Billion Left Workers in a Hole
For five years, Sunil Solankey, a retired captain in the Indian Army, had run the 20-room Four Sight Hotel in a New Delhi suburb. Business was steady, but he longed to make the establishment a destination for lucrative business travelers.
Last year, a hospitality start-up called Oyo told Mr. Solankey that it would turn the Four Sight into a flagship hotel for corporate customers. It guaranteed him monthly payments whether the rooms were booked or not, as long as he rebranded the property with Oyo’s name and sold the rooms exclusively through its site.
At Oyo’s request, Mr. Solankey sank 600,000 rupees, or $8,400, into reupholstering the hotel’s furniture and adding new linens. But corporate guests did not materialize, and Oyo stopped making the payments. Now he is on the verge of eviction.
11 November, 2019
About the Apple Card
My name is Jamie Heinemeier Hansson. Since my husband, David, tweeted about an unfortunate and ridiculous situation with AppleCard that involves me, I have been (or my credit-worthiness has been) the subject of lots of speculation. Unlike David, I am an extremely private person who does not post on social media. I am slightly mortified to have my name in the news. However, lest I be cast as a meek housewife who cannot speak for herself, I would like to make the following statement:
I care about digital privacy. It’s why I wanted an AppleCard in the first place.
I care about transparency and fairness. It’s why I was deeply annoyed to be told by AppleCard representatives, “It’s just the algorithm,” and “It’s just your credit score.” I have had credit in the US far longer than David. I have never had a single late payment. I do not have any debts. David and I share all financial accounts, and my very good credit score is higher than David’s. I had a career and was successful prior to meeting David, and while I am now a mother of three children — a “homemaker” is what I am forced to call myself on tax returns — I am still a millionaire who contributes greatly to my household and pays off credit in full each month. But AppleCard representatives did not want to hear any of this. I was given no explanation. No way to make my case.
10 November, 2019
The Legend of A-N-N-A: Revisiting an American Town Where Black People Weren’t Welcome After Dark
Loewen said sundown towns sprang up all around the country from 1890 to 1940, a period he calls the “nadir” of race relations in America. “For the small, independent towns all around the state that are still all white or almost all white, it’s like the civil rights movement never happened,” he told me.
Anna’s historical resistance to black people is, and has long been, well known in the region. Even though it may never have been codified, I found references to the fact that black people weren’t allowed to live in Anna in newspaper articles from as early as 1903. In that particular reference, a woman from Anna who worked as a hotel maid in Indianapolis was quoted as saying, “I never saw more than 10 negroes in all my life until I was 18 … as a negro is not allowed to stop in our little village of Anna.”
Over the past two years, I visited the town several times to try to understand where Anna’s history had left the town today. I talked with people going about their lives — in the library, the Farm Fresh milk store, the Blue Boar restaurant, the city’s park, the Walmart parking lot and other pockets of Anna. I talked with public officials, historians and longtime residents. I visited a grave in the Anna cemetery that belongs to the man deemed by a local newspaper in 1916 to be “the only colored man who has ever lived in this city” and I spent some time with one of the few black families (if not the only one) living in Anna today.
Still, I’m not going to claim I know Anna’s full story — I’m an outsider. But after hearing A-N-N-A said aloud that night, I realized my race made me a sort of insider, too. Would the man who first recited A-N-N-A have done so if I weren’t white? Nearly everyone I met knew what Anna stands for — whether they heard it first as a “joke” at school or from their grandparents or just from living here long enough. Most people said they wished the A-N-N-A reputation would just go away and were quick to say Anna wasn’t “like that” anymore.
Like what? I’d ask. If Anna has changed, how?
09 November, 2019
CBP agents wrote fake court dates on paperwork to send migrants back to Mexico, records show
Asylum seekers who have finished their court cases are being sent back to Mexico with documents that contain fraudulent future court dates, keeping some migrants south of the border indefinitely, records show.
Under the Migrant Protection Protocols policy, asylum seekers with cases in the United States have to wait in Mexico until those cases are resolved. The Mexican government agreed to only accept migrants with future court dates scheduled.
Normally, when migrants conclude their immigration court cases, they are either paroled into the United States or kept in federal custody depending on the outcome of the case.
However, records obtained by The San Diego Union-Tribune show that on at least 14 occasions, Customs and Border Protection agents in California and Texas gave migrants who had already concluded their court cases documents with fraudulent future court dates written on them and sent the migrants back to Mexico anyway.
Megyn Kelly Interviews Producer Fired For Accessing ABC’s Hot Mic Tape On Epstein
Megyn Kelly nabbed an exclusive interview with former ABC News employee Ashley Bianco, the journalist who had access to a tape released earlier this week of Amy Robach venting on a hot mic that the network killed her reporting on convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Bianco, who was an associate producer at “Good Morning America” before leaving for “CBS This Morning” last month, admitted that she made a clip of the Robach moment after seeing it at her desk while still at ABC. The producer said she saved the clip she made in the ABC News system ― something that producers do all the time ― but insisted that she did not leak it to anyone.
“I did it just for office gossip,” said Bianco, who said the intention wasn’t to embarrass Robach or ABC News.
04 November, 2019
Fear and Loathing in Beaumont, Texas - TDY Edition (self.MilitaryStories)
"I thought my war was bad, I feel bad for your situation with those bombs they put on the roads. Scary stuff."
"You were in?"
"Army, Vietnam. I was a forward observer."
This dude then proceeds to tell me stories about hiding in the brush from dog handlers who were hunting them down since they were forward observers. He proceeds to mention that if it wasn't for some Native American teaching them how to hide their scent, he would have been found. Basically learned how to rub shit on themselves so they could evade dog handlers. I'm sitting there in dismay at how he felt bad for my war... I may have gone into Iraqi shit creeks more than I cared for but I wasn't purposely rubbing shit in my hair so I could be behind deadly frontlines.
He then proceeds to talk about a battle he was in. How they were being overran at one point by the Vietnamese.
"We lost a lot of good men that day. Lots of friends." A slight tear rolls down his cheek and I saw him brush it away. You can usually spot a bull shitter with their gloats of heroism and valor. You know you're dealing with a man who had seen some shit when eyes water. A man who had seen some real hard shit in the bush. I could be wrong but I got the feeling he was the type that buried his experiences deep into his mind and never really got the chance to express his memories. He was a successful construction owner but I'm sure he still has nights judging by what he was telling me. Only to be probably spit on when he came home.
30 October, 2019
Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools
Each of these questions are considered in Anthony Abraham Jack’s The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students. Jack’s argument is that it is well and good that elite campuses continue to diversify their student bodies, but it is not enough. They must also recognize that lower income students are different. Among these students there are real cultural differences and levels of college preparedness because of the high schools from which they graduated. These differences are captured in what he refers to as the Privileged Poor and the Doubly Disadvantaged.
The Privileged Poor are lower-income graduates of wealthy private high schools like St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire and Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts. These students, according to Jack, have benefited from all the resources and opportunities their exclusive high schools provided—study abroad programs, language immersion, and contact with faculty with higher degrees. As Jack puts it, “Lower income graduates from these schools enter college already accustomed to navigating elite academic arenas, already familiar with the ways and customs of the rich. True, they are poor, but they have the privilege of an early introduction to the world they will enter in college.”
The Doubly Disadvantaged on the other hand, tend to be students of color and from local public high schools that are under-sourced, racially and socioeconomically segregated, overcrowded, and chaotic. Often the teachers in these schools are younger, inexperienced, and unsupported. According to Jack, when these students “first set foot on an elite college campus, it looks, feels, and functions like nothing they have experienced before.”
29 October, 2019
Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours
https://alexdanco.com/2019/10/26/everything-is-amazing-but-nothing-is-ours/
We love services. Services free us to be pure consumers, seeking exactly what we want for as little friction and overhead as possible. So long as everything works, trading ownership for access is an attractive deal: everything under the hood just gets magic-ed away, and provided for us as a service. No files, no updates, no maintenance; just access.
We love services. Services free us to be pure consumers, seeking exactly what we want for as little friction and overhead as possible. So long as everything works, trading ownership for access is an attractive deal: everything under the hood just gets magic-ed away, and provided for us as a service. No files, no updates, no maintenance; just access.
This isn’t just a software thing, by the way. New technology generally reorganizes our consumption away from ownership and towards access. 100 years ago, music came from a piano, then it came from the record store, and now it comes from Spotify. 100 years ago, food came from a farm, then it came for a grocery store, and now it comes from DoorDash. There’s no denying that this is forward progress for the consumer. You would not want to go backwards. But there’s a cost. The more you can access, the less it’s yours.
25 October, 2019
The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time
This isn’t contained to Twitter: The internet has finally and firmly moved from being an obscure gathering for nerds to the foundation for most communication. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch traces that history in Because Internet, her recent book that is particularly interested in the different waves of users — people who started using email at work in the ’90s, for instance, or millennials who grew up chatting on instant messaging apps — and how those platforms or users have affected language. These generational differences can manifest in small but familiar ways; McCulloch explores why people who are long accustomed to chat and text use line breaks for timing and emphasis, and intuit information left unsaid in an ellipsis. (Hey are you around…) She contends that a younger generation of users over the last decade, who’ve never known an internet without Facebook or YouTube, have turned to a phone experience that emphasizes control over context: disappearing messages, live video, using second and third accounts for specialization and privacy.
As the 2010s went on, the platforms adopted the live and the disappearing and attempted to reach you with what you care about most — to make the experience less disorienting by focusing on what garners the most attention. During the 2016 election, Instagram added the ephemeral stories and shifted to an algorithmic timeline. “If your favorite musician shares a video from last night’s concert, it will be waiting for you when you wake up, no matter how many accounts you follow or what time zone you live in,” reads the corporate unveiling, a cheerful promise of permanent detachment from the clock in favor of what you (are thought to) care about.
Here's Why Ants Are Practically Immune to Traffic Jams, Even on Crowded Roads
Filming 170 repeat experiments, researchers observed how this particular species of ant moved along a bridge between their nest and a food source. The experiments included different widths of bridge (5 mm, 10 mm, and 20 mm), holding anywhere between 400 and 25,600 ants.
Throughout the process, data was collected on traffic flow, the speed of the ants, and the number of collisions that occurred.
What the authors found was surprising: these ants appeared to be immune to traffic jams.
"The exact nature of the mechanisms used by Argentine ants to keep the traffic flowing in this study remains elusive," they write, "yet when density on the trail increases, ants seemed to be able to assess crowding locally, and adjusted their speed accordingly to avoid any interruption of traffic flow."
In fact, compared to humans, these ants could load up the bridge with twice the capacity without slowing down. When humans are walking or driving, the flow of traffic usually begins to slow when occupancy reaches 40 percent. Argentine ants, on the other hand, show no signs of slowing, even when the bridge occupancy reached 80 percent.
24 October, 2019
Dropshipping journalism - No one working at Newsweek can tell me why it still exists
Newsweek has the name and the professional website it has built in years past, but it’s increasingly repurposing the work of others—whether the Washington Post, the outrage fiends at Fox News, or a dozen people on Twitter—and packaging it as its own. Plenty of news sites aggregate, and in many ways the story of Newsweek is the story of the industry. But whereas other aggregators—Mashable, BuzzFeed, Upworthy; the list goes on—built their sites around this kind of internet-first strategy, Newsweek is selling off its own legacy while hoping that readers won’t notice. Reporters and editors there tell me they’re willing to do good work; the question is whether Newsweek is willing, or even able, to find a business model that allows them to do it.
22 October, 2019
British journalists have become part of Johnson’s fake news machine
Had the comment been made on the record by an official government spokesperson Shipman would have been well within his rights.
The spokesperson would have been accountable for her or his allegation against Rudd. He or she could have been identified and questioned about it.
Instead Shipman allowed an unknown Whitehall figure to label Rudd a liar, while granting him or her complete impunity.
Put another way, he allowed his Twitter account to be used as a vehicle for someone unknown to smear a prominent public figure as dishonest.
20 October, 2019
Remembering Action Park, America's Most Dangerous, Daring Water Park
Over the decades Andy has relived the Action Park fatalities many times, especially since in one case, the 1984 DePass drowning, he was the one who, as a 20-year-old lifeguard, pulled the body from the bottom. "It was devastating," he says.
But the Mulvihills lived by a code. Amusement/water parks come with an implicit buyer-beware contract. "Do they close the Jersey Shore when there's a drowning?" Andy asks. "Should you only have things for people that are 100% safe? Life would be pretty boring, right?" Needless to say, those questions are rhetorical.
In his reflective moments, though, Andy concedes his father was to a large degree the author of his own misfortunes, and he certainly walked an ethical tightrope in his business operations. "Gene cut a lot of corners—a lot of corners," he says, "and sometimes he got caught and there were repercussions. That's what happens when you live life like there's no tomorrow."
19 October, 2019
)REPOR T OF THE REPORT 116-XX SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE UNITED STATES SENATE ON RUSSIAN ACTIVE MEASURE;S CAMPAIGNS AND INTERFERENCE IN THE 2016 U.S. ELECTION
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf
(U) Analysis of the behavior of the IRA-associated social media accounts makes dear that while the Russian information warfare campaign exploited the context of the election and election-related issues in 2016, the preponderance of the operational focus, as reflected repeatedly in content, account names, and audiences targeted, was on sociapy divisive issues-such as race, immigration, and Second Amendment rights-in an attempt to pit Americans against one another and against their government. The Committee found that IRA influence operatives consistently used hot-button, societal divisions in the United States as fodder for the content they published through social media in order to stoke anger, provoke outrage and protest, push Americans further away from one another, and foment distrust in government institutions. The divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election was just an additional feature of a much more expansive,, target-rich landscape of potential ideological and societal sensitivities.
(U) The Committee found that the IRA targeted not only Hillary Clinton, but also Republican candidates during the presidential primaries. For example, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were targeted and denigrated, as was Jeb Bush. 14 As Clint Watts, a former FBI Agent and expert in social media weaponization, testified to the Committee, "Russia's overt media outlets and covert trolls sought to sideline opponents on both sides of the political spectrum with adversarial views towards the Kremlin." IRA operators sought"to impact primaries for both major parties and "may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed."
(U) Analysis of the behavior of the IRA-associated social media accounts makes dear that while the Russian information warfare campaign exploited the context of the election and election-related issues in 2016, the preponderance of the operational focus, as reflected repeatedly in content, account names, and audiences targeted, was on sociapy divisive issues-such as race, immigration, and Second Amendment rights-in an attempt to pit Americans against one another and against their government. The Committee found that IRA influence operatives consistently used hot-button, societal divisions in the United States as fodder for the content they published through social media in order to stoke anger, provoke outrage and protest, push Americans further away from one another, and foment distrust in government institutions. The divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election was just an additional feature of a much more expansive,, target-rich landscape of potential ideological and societal sensitivities.
(U) The Committee found that the IRA targeted not only Hillary Clinton, but also Republican candidates during the presidential primaries. For example, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were targeted and denigrated, as was Jeb Bush. 14 As Clint Watts, a former FBI Agent and expert in social media weaponization, testified to the Committee, "Russia's overt media outlets and covert trolls sought to sideline opponents on both sides of the political spectrum with adversarial views towards the Kremlin." IRA operators sought"to impact primaries for both major parties and "may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed."
Brexit: The uncomfortable truth about Boris Johnson's deal
https://news.sky.com/story/brexit-boris-johnson-would-have-rejected-his-deal-if-theresa-may-achieved-it-11839137
But this is about something deeper: the Tory hardliners are coming onboard because their side has finally won.
But this is about something deeper: the Tory hardliners are coming onboard because their side has finally won.
The fight against Mrs May's deal was as much about her as about its contents.
Her opponents voted against it repeatedly because they wished to remove her and wagered that that was the best way.
18 October, 2019
A Million People Are Jailed at China's Gulags. I Managed to Escape. Here's What Really Goes on Inside
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/djlms0/a_million_people_are_jailed_at_chinas_gulags_i/
“At the end of 2016, the police began arresting people at night, secretly,” Sauytbay related. “It was a socially and politically uncertain period. Cameras appeared in every public space; the security forces stepped up their presence. At one stage, DNA samples were taken from all members of minorities in the region and our telephone SIM cards were taken from us. One day, we were invited to a meeting of senior civil servants. There were perhaps 180 people there, employees in hospitals and schools. Police officers, reading from a document, announced that reeducation centers for the population were going to open soon, in order to stabilize the situation in the region.”
By stabilization, the Chinese were referring to what they perceived as a prolonged separatist struggle waged by the Uyghur minority. Terrorist attacks were perpetrated in the province as far back as the 1990s and the early 2000s. Following a series of suicide attacks between 2014 and 2016, Beijing launched a tough, no-holds-barred policy.
“At the end of 2016, the police began arresting people at night, secretly,” Sauytbay related. “It was a socially and politically uncertain period. Cameras appeared in every public space; the security forces stepped up their presence. At one stage, DNA samples were taken from all members of minorities in the region and our telephone SIM cards were taken from us. One day, we were invited to a meeting of senior civil servants. There were perhaps 180 people there, employees in hospitals and schools. Police officers, reading from a document, announced that reeducation centers for the population were going to open soon, in order to stabilize the situation in the region.”
By stabilization, the Chinese were referring to what they perceived as a prolonged separatist struggle waged by the Uyghur minority. Terrorist attacks were perpetrated in the province as far back as the 1990s and the early 2000s. Following a series of suicide attacks between 2014 and 2016, Beijing launched a tough, no-holds-barred policy.
17 October, 2019
WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism
The goal of Son, and increasingly most large financiers in private equity and venture capital, is to find big markets and then dump capital into one player in such a market who can underprice until he becomes the dominant remaining actor. In this manner, financiers can help kill all competition, with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly.
Engaging in such a strategy used to be illegal, and was known as predatory pricing. There are laws, like Robinson-Patman and the Clayton Act, which, if read properly and enforced, prohibit such conduct. The reason is very basic to capitalism. Capitalism works because companies that thrive take a bunch of inputs and create a product that is more valuable than the sum of its parts. That creates additional value, and in such a model companies have to compete by making better goods and services.
What predatory pricing does is to enable competition purely based on access to capital. Someone like Neumann, and Son’s entire model with his Vision Fund, is to take inputs, combine them into products worth less than their cost, and plug up the deficit through the capital markets in hopes of acquiring market power later or of just self-dealing so the losses are placed onto someone else. This model has spread. Bird, the scooter company, is not making money. Uber and Lyft are similarly and systemically unprofitable. This model is catastrophic not just for individual companies, but for their competitors who have to *make* money. I’ve written about this problem before. Amazon has created a much less competitive and brittle retail sector. Netflix’s money-losing business is ruining Hollywood.
15 October, 2019
After 80 years, DeKalb to demolish water tower in Decatur
https://www.ajc.com/news/local/after-years-dekalb-demolish-water-tower-decatur/1PDIezqDGI0jtYNs3gm1pN/
For about 80 years, the water tower bearing the Decatur logo hovered over residents and guests as they drove in to the city.
But by 2019, the tower will be no more.
But by 2019, the tower will be no more.
12 October, 2019
WEATHER REPORTS: VOICES FROM XINJIANG
https://believermag.com/weather-reports-voices-from-xinjiang/
Chinese officials initially denied the existence of mass internment camps in Xinjiang. Since 2018, they have described them as vocational and educational centers for “criminals involved in minor offenses.” But leaked documents suggest that residents are targeted for detention en masse based on their ethnic background, religious practices, and any history of traveling abroad. According to one internal report by Xinjiang’s agriculture department, the drive has been so thorough that “all that’s left in the homes are the elderly, weak women, and children.”
Chinese officials initially denied the existence of mass internment camps in Xinjiang. Since 2018, they have described them as vocational and educational centers for “criminals involved in minor offenses.” But leaked documents suggest that residents are targeted for detention en masse based on their ethnic background, religious practices, and any history of traveling abroad. According to one internal report by Xinjiang’s agriculture department, the drive has been so thorough that “all that’s left in the homes are the elderly, weak women, and children.”
No independent monitoring is permitted inside Xinjiang. State-sponsored tours for journalists and government emissaries are highly choreographed. The region has become a black box, with little reliable news getting in or out except through extraordinary channels: satellite photography, secret communications between family members across borders, and a handful of former detainees who have escaped China. Foreign correspondents who travel to Xinjiang are closely monitored and report being harassed, assaulted, and even kidnapped by authorities.
In 2018, I began to travel to Kazakhstan to interview the family members of Xinjiang’s imprisoned and disappeared. I also interviewed former detainees who described their own experiences. Most had crossed from China into Kazakhstan in the weeks, months, and years before our meeting, either by applying for residency and citizenship or by escaping across the border. The result is an oral history of life in contemporary Xinjiang. To my knowledge, it is the first document of its kind.
SRE as a Lifestyle Choice
https://medium.com/@bellmar/sre-as-a-lifestyle-choice-de9f5a82d73d
In theory the vast majority of hiring the government does should be through a competitive process governed by Title 5. In reality that system is shockingly and profoundly broken. Something like 60% of positions that open through competitive hiring close without an offer put out to a single qualified candidate. One could write an entire thesis on how broken it is or why it is broken, but here are some highlights to give you the lay of the land
11 October, 2019
“YOU ARE TO STAND DOWN”: RONAN FARROW’S PRODUCER ON HOW NBC KILLED ITS WEINSTEIN STORY
Rich McHugh recounts how top NBC brass, including news chairman Andrew Lack and news president Noah Oppenheim, bowed to Harvey Weinstein to quash the truth.
10 October, 2019
The Fragility of American Citizenship
Naturalized citizens are at particular risk of losing their citizenship under the Trump administration, as Baljinder Singh recently discovered. Singh has lived in the United States for nearly three decades, married a U.S. citizen, and became a naturalized citizen more than 10 years ago. Nonetheless, last year the government revoked his citizenship. Why? Because when he arrived in the United States as a teenager, the government recorded his first name as “Davinder” rather than “Baljinder”—quite possibly due to an interpreter’s error—and he never received the notice to appear in immigration court under that different name.
Explaining Privilage
https://twitter.com/hashim_warren/status/1181008078839406592
How can I explain privilege? 🤔— Hashim Warren (@hashim_warren) October 7, 2019
My dad owned an arcade. When I came in the manager flipped a switch so I had unlimited Ms Pac-Man lives
I thought this was normal. I had no idea other kids had to pay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I got fairly good at the game, better than most
That's privilege
09 October, 2019
Athletics dept. rethinks JV teams as participation dwindles
When Athletic Director Lisa Melendy came to the College in the mid-1980s, junior varsity (JV) teams were a fixture of athletic departments across the country. When Melendy coached the JV women’s lacrosse team 25 years ago, she could often field three teams on a game day, splitting the group up into shifts to give all the women playing time. However, after decades of decline in JV sports due to dwindling student participation, the College now only has a fraction of the teams it once had. “That was the mid-90s,” she said. “And now we can’t even get enough people on a bus to go to a game. It’s changed so dramatically.”
Currently, only three JV teams remain: men’s JV soccer, men’s JV basketball and women’s JV basketball. This fall, the longstanding women’s JV soccer program was converted into a physical education class, after years of difficulties with participation and finding other teams to compete against. The women’s JV lacrosse team underwent the same transition last spring, but was ultimately cancelled after receiving no sign-ups. There are no plans to bring back the program this spring, Melendy said.
These changes are indicative of a broader trend in collegiate athletics, Melendy said. Many of the College’s peer institutions have ended their JV programs in the past decade, as participation levels and athletic department budgeting for JV teams decreased.
The United Kingdom Has Gone Mad
The entire Brexit choice was presented to the public in 2016 with utterly misleading simplicity. It was sold with a pack of lies about both the size of the benefits and the ease of implementation, and it continues to be pushed by Conservative hard-liners who used to care about business but are now obsessed with restoring Britain’s “sovereignty” over any economic considerations.
They don’t seem to be listening at all to people like Tom Enders, C.E.O. of the aerospace giant Airbus, which employs more than 14,000 people in the U.K., with around 110,000 more local jobs connected to its supply chains. Enders has warned the political leadership here that if the U.K. just crashes out of the E.U. in the coming weeks, Airbus may be forced to make some “potentially very harmful decisions” about its operations in Britain.
“Please don’t listen to the Brexiteers’ madness which asserts that ‘because we have huge plants here we will not move. …’ They are wrong,” he said. “And, make no mistake, there are plenty of countries out there who would love to build the wings for Airbus aircraft.”
07 October, 2019
WEATHER REPORTS: VOICES FROM XINJIANG
https://believermag.com/weather-reports-voices-from-xinjiang/
Now, after months without news, I just recently got a letter from my daughter’s colleague. Their firm had become concerned with her case. They managed to send a colleague to the camp to speak with her. In the letter, my daughter told her colleague she felt completely brainwashed. She said she felt like she had been born in that place, like she’d spent her whole life in the camp. She said she could barely remember her family. The colleague’s letter was sent to me here in Kazakhstan, and included another new piece of information: if I returned to China, my daughter would be released.
Now, after months without news, I just recently got a letter from my daughter’s colleague. Their firm had become concerned with her case. They managed to send a colleague to the camp to speak with her. In the letter, my daughter told her colleague she felt completely brainwashed. She said she felt like she had been born in that place, like she’d spent her whole life in the camp. She said she could barely remember her family. The colleague’s letter was sent to me here in Kazakhstan, and included another new piece of information: if I returned to China, my daughter would be released.
Why do they care about me? I’ve heard each village has to meet a quota of how many people are sent to each political camp. Most people are taken into the camps for religious knowledge or for having relatives in Kazakhstan. I fall into both categories. I imagine I’d be useful for filling those quotas. And not only was I an imam, I overstayed my visa by a year. I was supposed to go back to China one month after I came to Kazakhstan. I violated the terms of my visa. If I go back, I’ll be put on trial. When my daughter’s firm inquired at the camp to ask why she was being detained, they received the following reply: it’s not about her; it’s about her father.
06 October, 2019
Strike with the Band
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/strike-with-the-band-wagner
Despite its reputation as being a pastime of the rich and cultured elite, classical musicianship is better understood as a job, a s***** job, and the people who do that job are workers just as exploited as any Teamster. Classical music has a high rate of workplace injury, especially chronic pain and hearing loss. Many musicians don’t own their instruments, some of which can be as expensive as a new car. My high school orchestra teacher, who played in a regional symphony, was still paying off a viola that cost $20,000. Even the elite among players don’t own their instruments outright; many of these instruments, including Amati and Stradivari violins, are loaned by philanthropists as gifts. I had to rent violins from the same company for sixteen years before I had accrued enough credit to buy one outright at $7,000, right before I graduated from college. One percussionist I interviewed, who works as a middle school band teacher, told me: “As a percussionist, another point of privilege comes with equipment. To own everything we could ever need professionally is very costly, especially a marimba, vibraphone, and full set of timpani. So that’s another huge point of privilege when, for example, one of my middle school students . . . his parents bought him a marimba earlier in the year. Which is great for him, yet here I am with my master’s degree, and I definitely don’t own one yet. I probably won’t for a long time.”
Despite its reputation as being a pastime of the rich and cultured elite, classical musicianship is better understood as a job, a s***** job, and the people who do that job are workers just as exploited as any Teamster. Classical music has a high rate of workplace injury, especially chronic pain and hearing loss. Many musicians don’t own their instruments, some of which can be as expensive as a new car. My high school orchestra teacher, who played in a regional symphony, was still paying off a viola that cost $20,000. Even the elite among players don’t own their instruments outright; many of these instruments, including Amati and Stradivari violins, are loaned by philanthropists as gifts. I had to rent violins from the same company for sixteen years before I had accrued enough credit to buy one outright at $7,000, right before I graduated from college. One percussionist I interviewed, who works as a middle school band teacher, told me: “As a percussionist, another point of privilege comes with equipment. To own everything we could ever need professionally is very costly, especially a marimba, vibraphone, and full set of timpani. So that’s another huge point of privilege when, for example, one of my middle school students . . . his parents bought him a marimba earlier in the year. Which is great for him, yet here I am with my master’s degree, and I definitely don’t own one yet. I probably won’t for a long time.”
05 October, 2019
How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
A piece of good news in all this is that the timescales here are huge. The sun’s bad behavior doesn’t start for an insanely long time, and I’m assuming that if we make it all the way to the end of the green window, our technology by that point will enable us to either A) easily move around to safe parts of the Solar System as needed, B) become a multi-solar species that can spread out to other life-friendly solar systems in the galaxy, and/or C) create safe space habitats that make energy without the need for stars—either through nuclear technology or, much more likely, some advanced technique we can’t conceive of.
So our to-do list is:
1) Get ourselves Earth-proof (by going multi-planetary) before something extincts us on Earth. Which will give us plenty of time to:
2) Get ourselves Solar System-proof before the sun ruins the Solar System.
And when it comes to Item 1, yes, the next mass extinction event could happen anytime, but if we take the next few thousand years to figure out how to expand beyond Earth, odds are we’ll be able to back ourselves up before anything too catastrophic happens.
Botham Jean’s Brother’s Offer of Forgiveness Went Viral. His Mother’s Calls for Justice Should Too.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/october-web-only/botham-jean-forgiveness-amber-guyger.html
Brandt Jean’s response to his brother’s murderer helps us see the gospel.
But so does Allison Jean’s.
Did you miss hers? Only one response was widely shared on social media after the conviction and sentencing of Amber Guyger, a former Dallas police officer who entered 26-year-old Botham Jean’s apartment and fatally shot him. On Wednesday, Guyger was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The Jean family was given the opportunity to make a victim impact statement. Brandt used his time to directly address the officer who killed his brother.
He said, “If you truly are sorry, I know I can speak for myself, I forgive you.”
Brandt told Guyger that Botham would have wanted her to give her life to Christ. He asked to give Guyger a hug, and after State District Judge Tammy Kemp gave her okay, Brandt offered a long embrace. In the video, you can hear Guyger’s loud sobs.
Most have probably seen this footage. Brandt’s offer of forgiveness and hug has been shared and praised widely across social media.
But many have likely missed footage from the rest of the family, including these words from Botham’s mother, Allison Jean.
"Forgiveness for us as Christians is a healing for us, but as my husband said, there are consequences. It does not mean that everything else we have suffered has to go unnoticed,” Mother Allison told the court.
04 October, 2019
Runs in the Family
Kansas City Chiefs running backs coach Deland McCullough went searching for his biological parents. He found them where he never would have expected.
03 October, 2019
01 October, 2019
‘At What Point Does Malfeasance Become Fraud?’: NYU Biz-School Professor Scott Galloway on WeWork
You can only blame charismatic CEOs for so much. What is wrong with investors?
There’s a few things at play here. One is just a function of the marketplace. It’s frothy, and there’s more capital than operators. Any operator who has a vision and can promise the potential and convince people they can be the next Google or Facebook can attract billions of dollars right now. The reality is there’s more money out there. We reached “peak founder” with Travis Kalanick. Now, there’s always a tension between capital and founders around who has power. Ever since Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, slowly but surely the pendulum has swung back to the founder. In the ’90s, founders didn’t survive. We were seen as crazy, and once the company became real, we were to be shoved to the side and some 55-year-old CEO from PepsiCo was supposed to come in and be the real CEO. Then when Jobs was ousted and a series of gray-hairs came in and almost brought the company to the ground and he came back and took them from $3 billion to $300 billion, that changed everyone’s perception of founders. Then Bill Gates took a company from zero to $500 billion. So Bill Gates and Steve Jobs totally changed the market’s viewpoint on founders and the balance of powers shifted way back to founders. Founders were seen as DNA and visionary. We’ve not seen another peak. It’ll start swinging back. This is a train wreck.
David Gauke: We won’t leave the EU on October 31st – and Johnson will be blamed
https://www.conservativehome.com/thecolumnists/2019/09/david-gauke-we-would-not-leave-the-eu-on-october-31st-and-johnson-will-be-blamed.html
The overwhelming likelihood is that, by October 19th, the House of Commons will have neither voted to support a deal nor voted in favour of a No Deal Brexit. The EU Withdrawal (No 2) Act 2019 (or the Benn Act) is very clear as to what happens next. The Prime Minister must seek an extension to Article 50.
The overwhelming likelihood is that, by October 19th, the House of Commons will have neither voted to support a deal nor voted in favour of a No Deal Brexit. The EU Withdrawal (No 2) Act 2019 (or the Benn Act) is very clear as to what happens next. The Prime Minister must seek an extension to Article 50.
He does not like this state of affairs. He would prefer to leave without a deal. But what the Prime Minister would like to do is not the point. He has a statutory duty to seek an extension.
In the course of this week, Ministers will be repeatedly asked what will happen. Will the Government abide by the law? Yes, of course. Will the Government seek an extension? No.
The answers to these questions are mutually incompatible. The Government will seek to get away with this contradiction by hinting that there is a cunning plan, a secret flaw that only it knows about, something that only a strategic genius – who could turn his mind to legal matters as and when necessary – would be able to identify. Pin your hopes on that if you like, but my money would be on the UK being members of the EU on November 1st.
And then what happens? I know that there will be a huge amount of abuse and criticism directed at those of us who supported the Benn Act. We will take some consolation from the fact that goods are flowing in and out of the country as per usual, our agricultural and manufacturing industries are not facing crippling new tariffs and that the pound will not have tanked.
But what of the man who said – again and again – and who will continue to say this week – again and again – that we will leave on October 31st ‘come what may’? You might blame Parliament for the fact that the Prime Minister will have broken his promise, but Parliament didn’t force him to make that promise. It was a promise that depended upon factors beyond his control. It was a guarantee that he could not, in truth, guarantee.
Not for the first time in the Brexit process, a large part of the public will feel let down. And, I accept, that they will have been let down.
Statement by His Royal Highness Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex
As a couple, we believe in media freedom and objective, truthful reporting. We regard it as a cornerstone of democracy and in the current state of the world – on every level – we have never needed responsible media more.
Unfortunately, my wife has become one of the latest victims of a British tabloid press that wages campaigns against individuals with no thought to the consequences – a ruthless campaign that has escalated over the past year, throughout her pregnancy and while raising our newborn son.
There is a human cost to this relentless propaganda, specifically when it is knowingly false and malicious, and though we have continued to put on a brave face – as so many of you can relate to – I cannot begin to describe how painful it has been. Because in today’s digital age, press fabrications are repurposed as truth across the globe. One day’s coverage is no longer tomorrow’s chip-paper.
Up to now, we have been unable to correct the continual misrepresentations - something that these select media outlets have been aware of and have therefore exploited on a daily and sometimes hourly basis.
It is for this reason we are taking legal action, a process that has been many months in the making.
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